"How long do you think all this can
last?" asks a bored Mike at a swinging 60s happening. And this
throwaway line becomes the central thread of Michael Reeves's
stunning second film The Sorcerers, the movie that would pave
the way for his masterpiece Witchfinder Generalin 1968. While
on the surface offering a seemingly carefree world of mind altering
drugs, free love and promiscuous sex, Reeves instead probes deeper
and suggests a darker side where moral laxity leads not to joy, but
to destruction. For the characters who abandon responsibility, death
is waiting.

Dr. Marcus Moserrat (Boris Karloff) is
an aging medical hypnotist with a new invention. His machine can
allow the elderly, disabled and incapacitated the chance to enter a
younger subject's mind and live vicariously through them -
experiencing their loves, laughter and excitements as if it were
happening to them. To test the device, Dr. Marcus and his wife Estelle
(Catherine Lacey) enlist Mike (Ian Ogilvy) a swinger looking for new
kicks. The test is a success and the couple get to experience the
exhilaration of Mike swimming with his girlfriend Nicole (Elizabeth
Ercy) and riding full tilt on a motorbike. Marcus is ready to give
his invention to the public, but Estelle wants more. She wants to
know what it's like to steal, to make love again and to kill. After
all, it isn't really her doing these things, is it?

The Sorcerers' key theme of
living through others has been seen, perhaps rightly, by many critics
as a neat metaphor for the experiences of the average cinemagoer. The
Moserrat's sit in their darkened living room and escape into a
world that is not their own, just like anyone watching a film. But
Reeves goes further than that, and his eye seems to focus primarily
on the culture of the time and the question of culpability. Mike is a
paid up member of the free love generation, an excuse he uses to
abandon his responsibility for other people. He treats his friends
like commodities, ditching them without a word and then picking them
up again when he's in need of company. In a later scene, he pays a
visit to an ex-girlfriend (Susan George) and Reeves suggests that
this is another girl tossed aside by Mike and called upon only when
he's feeling desperate. "Why have you come here?" she asks
incredulously.

Ogilvy plays Mike with a kind of
glassy-eyed detachment, as if his soul, long before the film's
explosive conclusion, was already dead. His life is an attempt to
find, as Estelle says, "Ecstasy with no consequence," but it will
always remain beyond his grasp. In this way Estelle and Mike are
mirrored, and her own desire for youth and moral freedom ties her in
with Mike and the 60s youth culture. For the Moserrats the clock is
ticking and a life of quiet banality in their narrow London home is
all they have to show for it. Estelle uses the machine to unleash all
her repressed desires. She wheezes in fits of carnal delight as Mike
cuts up a girl with a pair of scissors and rocks with laughter at the
bloodshed (all shot from a low angle making her look like a deranged
harpy). She becomes the film's central demon and it is to the
credit of Reeves (and indeed Catherine Lacey) that they can make a
seemingly benign old lady such a figure of terror.

In terms of direction, Reeves has fully
assimilated the 60s psychedelic vibe, a choice that allows him to
fully explore the culture, but one that also serves to date the
movie. The clubs are awash with Technicolor lights (while the patrons
innocently sip coca-cola) and the Moserrat's hypno-device turns
their white room into a freaked-out disco (with purples, yellows and
far out pinks). The editing too is frantic and seems to be designed
to keep up with Estelle's manic energy, frequently cross-cutting
between Mike and the Moserrats when they're in control of his mind.
In the final act, the twisted extreme close ups of Estelle are cut in
an almost gloating fashion as Mike is forced to strangle a nightclub
singer. This technique makes it evident that Estelle cannot escape
her actions and she too has blood on her hands (literally too as a
cut Mike receives on his hand also appears on hers).

Oddly it is in Karloff, that denizen of
horror, that the film find it moral center. Ancient, arthritic,
stumbling on a wooden cane behind white hair and wild eyebrows, he is
forced to watch as his altruistic device is perverted by the woman he
loved. There has always been a deep humanity to Karloff as a
performer (witness the childlike innocence of his monster in 1931s
Frankenstein) and here he uses that to fully ally our
sympathies. He begins as a kind of mad professor (albeit from a
fundamentally 60s British perspective - picking up test subjects in
a greasy spoon and running experiments in an analogue lab) and ends
tied up and forced to share Estelle's murderous desire.

But for Reeves, Karloff's Dr. Marcus
was doomed the minute he created the device (emphasized by Paul
Ferris' score that chimes like a death clock). This is a film about
paying for one's actions, no matter how noble the initial intention.
Reeves crafts this theme neatly and brings to the fore the darkness
inherent in the 60s counter culture (that would explode in the real
world with the Manson slayings in 1968 and the Hells Angels/Rolling
Stones debacle in '69). And come the film's conclusion, Dr. Marcus has
learnt two things from the free love generation - 1. nothing lasts
forever and 2. when you abandon your soul, the fires of hell are
never far away.

Comments

Excellent review, Tom! This is the sort of review I liked to find when I go to the imdb external reviews. You brought up points I hadn't thought of while watching. Although I'm much more sympathetic to Mike that you are.
Cheers!